Rule Breaker 2

New Winds of Rule Breaker

The Holy Grail War is nearing its end and I have to say it has been a valuable experience. Lots of things will change on the systems as has been discussed. But a variety of changes are coming to this site and how it operates as well. I haven't told anybody about the following idea, as such everybody will find about it through this post. I want to share some thoughts before jumping to the main topic.

When I was working on the current system, the main point was to make it more game-like and less RP. Simply because forum role-playing needs to take a different approach rather than traditional tabletop RP. I also wanted to include lots of different things for players to do while events dragged on and on. I can say this system made very little progress towards those goals. I had my hands full with managing the rounds and making events for players. Plot elements and events were left a bit neglected, though they have appeared to some players. Also I'm pretty sure everybody are familiar with a certain event that caused so much drama and which was very time consuming. Other players were left hanging for 1-2 months.

The next project was going to be Vampire Hunt. With the new changes it would be a more like traditional RP where people party up against the game-master controlled enemies. But still I feel this would not solve all the problems. Now that we have discovered most of the flaws of this system regarding pure game mechanics - we can take our time to fix the rules and add new sections to them. What remains is how to take people into account with their different time-zones when dealing with events and how much time they take. I realized the answer last week.

Open Story

Rule Breaker would change so that every member could host scenarios, campaigns and every member could join them. I think it's fairly common concept on other forum RP sites. I would also like to try advertise our site on couple Nasuverse themed sites. I'm not sure how active the current fanbase is, but if we could get even five active role-players to join I think that would be pretty good. I'll try to explain how things would work out.


Creating a Character
When you create a character you use that character in every campaign you play in. That is why it should fit with the theme of all nasuverse creations. There will be a wider list of restrictions to come but it shouldn't limit your character creation if you have an original idea in mind. You can't create a character based on the known nasuverse characters. The biggest change to characters is that they keep earning experience through how many games you take place in. I don't have the actual numbers yet, but earning experience will be related to how hard the played game was and the quality of your posts.

Games
The term used for campaigns and scenarios created by members. They can be over in a single topic or they can extend over multiple topics. Each game will have the wanting game-master decide on the details of their campaign. The players can also leave threads where they post the details of the campaign and want somebody to game-master it. It's mostly for those character specific campaigns that somehow define your role-play character.
Difficulty: There will be a set amount of difficulties that restricts how hard the enemies or challenges in the campaigns can be. It doesn't currently affect anything else but I was thinking of setting a required post amount for the hardest campaigns.
Required Activity: How often should the participants posts. Once in 24 hours seems like the best option but it can be changed to suit the game-masters needs.
Members: Minimum and maximum amount of players you need for the game.
Other: You can set other details for the game. What time-zone should the players be from. Will you play part of the game in IRC. Things like that.

When you create your first games you a fairly limited on what kind of scenarios you can create. Once you successfully finish games you gain game-mastering points. Once you reach certain amount you can start including already known nasuverse characters and places on your games.

Other Details

• Your character can take part in multiple games at the same time.
  
• We will be setting a section on the forums where we will add the current status of different characters and places. I think creating some sort of time-line would be good, since the games can take place in variety of times. However there can also be games that don't take the time-line in account at all.
  
• You can have multiple characters. I'll edit the profiles Character Data section after this HGW so that you can have details for two characters.
  
• Vampire Hunt will be coming once the changes have settled in and I've seen couple of games in action.
  
• By default all the games can be viewed by anyone. However I can include hidden sections if you feel they are necessary for the nature of the game.
  
• Luck points will be making an appearance on the new rules.

I think I covered most of the important parts. I'm not entirely sure what you people think of this. If you have questions ask. If you have opinions I'll listen to them. However currently I strongly feel that this is the right direction to take.
Admin-sama out!

It is a radical change to what we are used and as you said it could solve several of the problems present in the current system. Getting more people to participate should be a priority in my opinion because it would allow for more "open stories" to take place at the same time, giving players always something to do.

Seems like a good idea but I got a few questions.

1) What would XP be used for? Would we just level up and the abilities we have get stronger or can we use that XP to purchase abilities and strengthen the ones we already have between games?

2) Would we gain abilities based on our actions during games like the MEoDP if we die and are somehow brought back to life or become a vampire if we get bitten by a DA?

3) What happens if we die during a game? Would we have to make a new character or keep using that character but is sent back to level one?

Interesting concept, thought I do not know how it will fit in a forum system.
Regarding kaede's point 3, something like the summoning system of FSN would be nice.
The actual character is somewhere outside the physical realm.
When a game starts a clone gets summoned and when he dies his knowledge gets passed to the original.

Sorry for late answer. Was busy with Assembly 2011 thingies. It's gonna end later today. Hopefully I'll get back on the track in 1-2 days.

kaede wrote:Seems like a good idea but I got a few questions.

1) What would XP be used for? Would we just level up and the abilities we have get stronger or can we use that XP to purchase abilities and strengthen the ones we already have between games?

2) Would we gain abilities based on our actions during games like the MEoDP if we die and are somehow brought back to life or become a vampire if we get bitten by a DA?

3) What happens if we die during a game? Would we have to make a new character or keep using that character but is sent back to level one?

1) XP is basically like character points in the current system.
2) Yeah it's possible once the rules are set for that.
3) Death means death. You however shouldn't have high chance of dying on medium difficulty and lower games. If you're attached to your character you need to go through some roleplay how he was revived.

Jad wrote:Interesting concept, thought I do not know how it will fit in a forum system.
Regarding kaede's point 3, something like the summoning system of FSN would be nice.
The actual character is somewhere outside the physical realm.
When a game starts a clone gets summoned and when he dies his knowledge gets passed to the original.

Don't think we need actual reason for the inconsistency.

If we really want to explain why our characters are in different time periods we could say all events are part of a simulation being run by the Moon Cell. That would explain why our characters are in different time periods then they should be sense it is a computer and errors in data can happen.

Anyone entertaining the idea of us playing the Servants and be given Masters? The different scenarios can be separate Holy Grail Wars or something.

That sounds like a good idea but I think it would be more interesting if both Masters and Servants were players. Just sounds like fun because if a player controls both the master and servant they both work together without any conflicts (unless they want them for RP) while a team with two PCs might have different styles of how to deal with a problem and could lead to friction.

Only problem with this would be that we would need 14 players to make full teams and a player playing as a berserker wouldn't have much to RP because they are mostly insane and cant talk properly but i guess that could be fixed where they can enter a berserk state during battle getting the stat boosts.

Admin-sama? My style is rubbing off on you grim? This sounds like an mmorpg on paper >.<

It's a working concept. I've been part on two forums that used the same thing and it turned out well. Main point would probably be advertising enough places and make it starter friendly so anybody can jump in and test things out first.

Lucid wrote:It's a working concept. I've been part on two forums that used the same thing and it turned out well. Main point would probably be advertising enough places and make it starter friendly so anybody can jump in and test things out first.

I have seen several RP groups on MAL which have over 100 members. Could be worth a try.

Just a small update. We're still working on this project. For Rule Breaker 2.0 all the new rules are going to be a single pdf file.


Overall I think it looks more professional and looking for specific rules will get easier.
EDIT: Just noticed there are some grammatical errors on that image but you get the idea.